Satellites peer down upon us, as we peer into the screens onto which their images beam.

Every action we take online adds to the story the earth is writing.

The next chapter?

Articles

Creative Director Stefan Sojka is one of Australia’s most published freelance writers and commentators on Web business and Internet culture. He has been a regular monthly columnist for the award-winning NETT magazine for the past three years. Previous roles included 7 years writing for internet.au magazine and the Australian Net Directory. He continues to contribute to a number of blogs and publications.

Back in the 80s, there was not much to do at home but watch TV – and my worst fear was becoming a couch potato. Fortunately the TV was so crap, it didn’t happen. Fast forward 20 years and thanks to the darned Internet and my addiction to it, I’ve turned into a Chair Pear! Oh how to end this endless cycle of motionlessness!? The ever-widening girth of my being! I know – I’ll check out a few Websites that might help me break this cyber spell… Oh the irony!

Once a place we went to for the sake of being there, the Web has evolved to become the place we go to find more and more excuses to unplug from the global super-cortex and rejoin humanity.

Servers all across the world are brimming with code, tailor-made to activate that dormant social ape-like being that rests beneath the Me2.0 cyber-persona I’ve spent the last 10 years perfecting. The good news? So has everyone else, so when we do Meet Up (www.meetup.com), surprise, surprise, there is a whole generation of cyber-apes, strangely un-socialised and desperate as I am for the allure and aroma of familiar organic entities.

And they have the same weird-ass special interests to boot. Humanists, Skeptics, philosophers, hackers, pagans, ninjas and entrepreneurs are forming groups, arranging get-togethers and having a bloody good time. I’ve just booked in for a ‘Skeptics in the Pub’ MeetUp. If I’m back next month, you can be sure this ‘getting-a-life’ thing is actually quite safe.

If you are, like, hanging around with, like, nothing to do, www.skobee.com is, like, the most random way to, like, hook up. It is only in the experimental phase, but the basic concept is ‘fuzzy scheduling’. You tell the site where you is at, how hip you is and how down you can get with the hood, and faster than you can say “Generation Y” – you’ve got yourself a happenin’ schedule of happenin’ people to get jiggy with. I hope they add a plug-in ‘dweeb scheduler’ module for un-hip dudes like me.

For the serious party and event organiser, www.eventbrite.com is the perfect service. A modest, sliding-scale fee, enables them to take care of bookings, ticket payments and event registration, so I can take care of the balloons, name tags and strippers.

When it comes to synchronising lifestyles with our friends – one of the hardest things modern life could possibly challenge us to do – www.renkoo.com has the solution. From the gregarious imagination of the folks that brought you such mega-million installed FaceBook apps as BoozeMail and HaikooZoo, here is the place to load up my availabilities and spam them out through every available medium to all my friend ‘Lites’ (15% more real friendliness, with only half the commitment). Guaranteed optimisation of our chill time.

A couple of others worth scoping: www.planyp.us – the “Wiki for your Social Life” weaves it all together, as does www.socializr.com. OK, I’ve finished writing this, you’ve finished reading the entire magazine… we are both pumped – let’s get online and hook up somewhere for coffee!